Management and labor have a cooperative and adversarial relationship. Fanboys of corporation will point out that it’s a corporation’s obligation to make money for its owners, which is absolutely true. Workers, however, have needs that go beyond merely staying employed; they have a need for a basic standard of living. That’s why we have government regulations and unions.
In turn, that is why corporations have lawyers, declare themselves corporate ‘persons’, and have lobbyists who help write laws on everything from tax policy to environmental rules to workplace safety regulations. And that is why we must vote not only in elections but vote to at least carry the stick of protecting workers rights and person’s livelihoods through the power of collective bargaining.
I don’t always agree with their tactics, and yes, sometimes they protect workers they probably shouldn’t, but unions are a necessary evil.
This was a public sector employer. Public sector employers, in addition to the ordinary pressure faced by other employers, also need to deal with pressure from voters like yourself for whom “not being always on the side of labor, of always seeking to be allied with labor, would [be] incomprehensible”.
I agree with this. Those stories were intended to be illustrative.
This is the classic conservative framing in the US.
Another way to look at it though, is that if a corporation is gaining all the benefits of operating in a country like the US (private land ownership, infrastructure, police and fire services, good judiciary, the fact it can be incorporated in the first place) and subjecting its workers to pay and conditions such that many will require public assistance or get sick and can’t afford medical bills etc…then the freeloader here is the corporation. Society’s getting a shitty deal.
Let alone one of the world’s biggest companies trying every dirty trick to try to circumvent workers’ right to decide for themselves whether to unionize.
Shit, they would have no workers at all if automation could enable them to think and do what humans could, and if it came cheaply enough. I think that’s where we’re heading, and when it happens so fast that the displacement occurs more rapidly than what our political and economic system can keep with…we’ve got a modern variant of the capitalism crisis.
If companies could make labor itself obsolete, they damn well would. But our basic human needs would still exist.
And yet those who are anti-union somehow think it’s wrong when labor does the exact same thing – i.e., organize themselves and hire lawyers and lobbyists and try to get laws written on tax policy and environmental rules and workplace safety regulations.
I notice that the word was pay rather than compensation. If you had really great benefits they could more than make up for even a sizable difference in wages.
(I can’t speak to the efficiency size of the equation.)
I’m not sure that I’m clear on the distinction that you’re making.
Let’s say that I have a job that pays me a salary that I consider fair, and that is commensurate with salaries at other companies for the same position. My job also offers me benefits like vacation, sick leave, a retirement package, and health insurance, all of which I take advantage of. I do my work, and my employer pays me regularly. We’re both fulfilling our side of the employment contract.
What’s the difference between “my employer is giving me my pay and benefits because they’re being benevolent to me,” versus “I’m earning my pay and benefits through my work”? How would I spot the difference?
So I guess you don’t work for UAW or one of the airline unions since they both have done that in the last 20 years in high profile cases.
I’d be curious about that. From what I’ve read Amazon (to tie this back to the OP) could tell every worker bee at their warehouse they are fired and probably be fully staffed again within a month. Losing a single warehouse probably wouldn’t hit their bottom line. Of course, it’ll illegal to fire people trying to form a union but if your statement is true it shouldn’t be.
Okay, but what’s illustrated by a story we’re not intended to believe? I mean, there’s zero chance that any employer, government- or non- actually signed a contract that said employees can “only be fired for drug offenses.” Zero. I believe this guy told you that, but he was not telling the truth. Is it supposed to illustrate how employees don’t understand their contracts? How employees sometimes lie about their contracts? How anti-union propaganda works? What’s being illustrated here?
I told earlier about my experience subcontracting for IBM and having to delete ~80% of my work because it was too useful. My lifelong takeaway from that story is that non-unionized, private corporations aren’t necessarily models of efficiency either.
Your wife’s co-worker’s boyfriend was a shlub who worked a private job, and then got a unionized government job. I’m not seeing this as a rigid devastation of unions here. Dilbert’s character Wally is a type you find in plenty of private sector workplaces.
Be interesting to examine one specific case that you’re talking about, and certainly more productive than talking about what friends and shops believe may or may not be true about unions.
It’s not anyone’s purpose. Businesses provide job opportunities and sell things because it’s the best way to make money. If there was a way to make money that didn’t involve employees and customers, businesses would do that instead. The business world is inherently amoral. Yes, individuals have morals, but individuals don’t last, and are always under pressure from other, potentially less moralistic, competition.
Businesses provide safe and lucrative jobs because governments, unions, and the labor market make it a cost of doing business. They sell wholesome, desirable products because it’s the best way to get customers to give them money, and because the government won’t always let them sell products that are inherently dangerous to individuals or society as a whole.
But they don’t exist for the purpose of doing those things, they do them in service of making money for their owners.
The funny part is the fanboys you describe who declare their support for the right of a business owner to act in his own self-interest and seek what’s best for himself - and further declare that this is a positive good for society - do not see that the same principle should be applied to the employees. They should be free to act in their own self-interest and seek what’s best for them. Somehow the owners are upholding capitalism when they do this but the employees are betraying capitalism by doing it. The employees are supposed to set aside their interests for the good of the company. Greed is good but only when the right people are doing it.
Strange how this contradictory view has become so prevalent. It’s almost as if the owners of the large corporations that own our nation’s media were disseminating lop-sided views that are favorable to the owners of large corporations.
This guy had to do very very little work and there was nothing his supervisor could do about it, as a result of his union protection. I believe it. Your call as to what you believe.
It was illustrative because it was only one story, but if you’ve gone through life and seen any number of such stories first, second, and third hand, then you can build something from it. In the case of a guy citing a couple of stories from memory on a MB, then “illustrative” is as good as you’re going to get.
The level of inefficiency that couldn’t cut it in the private sector was par for the course in a unionized quasi-public sector job.
(I believe the road crews work for private companies, but these are contracted by the government. Assuming the government has some sort of union requirement, then non-unionized companies can’t undercut the inefficient union ones, and the taxpayers pay the bills, so it’s effectively public service for our purposes.)
In addition to this, businesses provide safe and lucrative jobs because that’s what’s needed to establish a pool of customers. Henry Ford understood that; he famously wanted to pay his employees enough wages that they could afford to buy one of his cars.
But too many contemporary businesses have forgotten that simple principle. They all want to live in a world full of customers with money to spend - but want to pay their own employees as little as possible. Apparently they assume their competitors will cover this gap by paying their employees better wages than they are. Of course, if their competitor does do this, they’ll drive them out of business.
Here is a fairly balanced summary from the LA times on the benefits that Toyota has building non-union cars in the US vs GM and Ford. We can find similar stories about Tesla’s drive to stay non-union. Basically the unions are a load stone around the neck of legacy us auto makers and the upstarts that are kicking their buts are making quality vehicles while still providing good working conditions without the union.
Here again is a quick google on the United Bankruptcy from the early 2000s that was in large part driven by their loadstone union relationships. The unions have featured heavily in most of the airline bankruptcies that I’ve read about. Here is a recent one where the Southwest Union was fighting their member getting a pay cut despite Corona destroying their industry. While I do believe the union is doing its job fighting for its members in the Southwest case it certainly doesn’t seem to match
A big part of the reason the non-union employers offer such generous benefits is because they fear if the gap gets too big, then their workforces will unionize. So the unions are really subsidizing the non-union workers.